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12 Years of FLOSS License Compliance: A Historical Perspective

Kuhn began working on GPL enforcement in 1999 by doing C&CS (complete and corresponding source) checks for the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Over the next 12 years, Kuhn was involved with every major effort to enforce the GPL in the USA. Kuhn's talk starts even earlier than that: with the first-ever GPL violation in history in 1989, and continues with GPL violations through the era of big iron computing to the current standard of embedded device GPL violations that are widely prevalent. Kuhn will explain the conditions in the industry that cause violations and how non-profit organizations like the FSF and Software Freedom Conservancy have worked to ensure that developers' copyleft license choices have been upheld and defended throughout the last decade.